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Animoto

Last night we rolled out a partnership with Animoto that we’ve been excited about for years. You’ll find “Create an Animoto Video” in the Owner Only section of the Buy button when you’re logged in. Discover why we love Animoto on our CEO’s blog and on our help page.

Gallery viewing styles

We overhauled another viewing style, incorporating the best of All Thumbs and Traditional and adding magic to make it fill your page with photos. It goes by the name of “Thumbnails” and you’ll see it in the style menu on gallery pages. (You’ll see we kept All Thumbs and Traditional alive, but demoted them to the list in your Gallery Settings page.)

All viewing styles in the style menu now launch our Lightbox for single image viewing, and we tucked in some additional features: Owner Save for when you’re logged in, Save Photo for your visitors if you haven’t disabled original viewing, and Show Details. Click Show Details to get a neat side-by-side with the image on one side and any comments, camera info, and keywords on the other side.

Homepage boxes

All account levels now sport three new homepage boxes. It’s easy to drop a beautiful slideshow onto your page, pick a video or your favorite image to greet visitors, or display your most-recently uploaded photos. Our help page has a quick course on how to customize your homepage.

Big change for Pros

SmugMug is ready to move towards direct deposit for U.S. photographers. To that end, we’ve put the required W9 tax form online for you to fill out as well as information about which bank account we should put your money in when we make the change.

Even if you’ve previously filled out a paper W9 form for our accounting department, you’ll need to fill out the new online form prior to December 15th of this year so we’ll be able to continue paying your profit when we make the change in 2010.

NiceName Photo URLs

But now in the Get a Link feature, you’ll see that we serve up direct links that contain the photo’s filename as well as the NiceName for the category, subcategory, and gallery that photo lives in. Reason? Descriptive words directly associated with your photo = more relevant search engine results.
As always, SmugMug makes it easy to stay out of search engines if you’d prefer.

Fixes

Our Get a Link feature from the Share button will now properly update the embed code when the preview image is changed.

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We’ve been working for many months on a change that has involved every engineer at SmugMug and has kept the testers working evenings and weekends.

This release touched almost every feature and page and we’re still standing by to monitor the changes closely, because simulating the live site with its millions of varied users on test servers is a very big challenge.

It’s not a flashy release, in fact if we did our job perfectly, nothing will appear differently to our customers. But we’re very excited about it because it lays the foundation for bigger things to come.

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Being the luckiest guy on earth whose job (SmugMug) is his passion (cool photos and videos), I couldn’t resist heading to SF the day I got my new 7D and test its video capabilities to the limit–;and comparing it with the 5D MKII.